1991

Causes of Drought in the West African Sahel

Sahel — Etats Unis

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Causes of Drought in the West African Sahel

Organismes NSF : Division Of Human Resource Development (HRD)

Durée : November 1, 1991 — October 31, 1997

Description The PI’s research has focused on climate variability in Africa, especially drought in the Sahel. She plans to enhance her background by gaining a further understanding of ecology and of biophysical and hydrological processes, to incorporate these new skills in the general circulation model experiments to include explicit treatment of land surface processes, to explore the feedback that may involve dust generation during drought episodes and its impact on the atmosphere and to develop a model of atmospheric heating that explicitly considers dust layers, and to link these concepts to the specific systems that generate rainfall over West Africa, the easterly waves. The latter will require a study of how the surface energy and water balance affect the mid-level African easterly jet. The P.I. proposes this research with the goal of proving or disproving the theory of land surface feedback in the Sahel droughts.